modality vs tenor

modality

noun
  • The subject concerning certain diatonic scales known as musical modes. 

  • The way in which infrastructure and knowledge of how to use it give rise to a meaningful pattern of interaction (a concept in Anthony Giddens's structuration theory). 

  • Any of the senses (such as sight or taste) 

  • The organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations. 

  • The quality of being limited by a condition. 

  • A particular way in which the information is to be encoded for presentation to humans, i.e. to the type of sign and to the status of reality ascribed to or claimed by a sign, text or genre. 

  • The classification of propositions on the basis on whether they claim possibility, impossibility, contingency or necessity; mode. 

  • The inflection of a verb that shows how its action is conceived by the speaker; mood 

  • The fact of being modal. 

  • A method of diagnosis or therapy. 

tenor

noun
  • A musical range or section higher than bass and lower than alto. 

  • Tone, as of a conversation. 

  • Stamp; character; nature. 

  • An exact copy of a writing, set forth in the words and figures of it. It differs from purport, which is only the substance or general import of the instrument. 

  • A tenor saxophone. 

  • A person, instrument, or group that performs in the tenor (higher than bass and lower than alto) range. 

  • The subject in a metaphor to which attributes are ascribed. 

  • The lowest tuned in a ring of bells. 

  • Time to maturity of a bond. 

  • That course of thought which holds on through a discourse; the general drift or course of thought; purport; intent; meaning; understanding. 

adj
  • Of or pertaining to the tenor part or range. 

How often have the words modality and tenor occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )